Featured collections

The SDR attracts a broad range of individuals and organizations at Stanford and beyond who have content of long-term scholarly value to share and preserve. Below are some examples illustrating how the SDR meets their needs.

VISTA Lab's research data

Scientists at the Stanford Vision Imaging Science and Technology Lab regularly publish journal articles on the findings of their cutting-edge research. However, journals usually only publish the text, not the underlying data or algorithms which led to the findings. To offer full access to their research, Dr. Brian Wandell and his team deposit the data sets in SDR and link them directly with their publications.

Honors theses

Many Stanford programs invite their top undergraduate students to submit theses as part of their culminating experience. Over time the departments have accumulated these theses -- stored in file cabinets and, later, on servers or local hard drives -- to form an ad hoc collection lovingly maintained for reference by future students and nostalgic alumni. Faculty and administrators take great pride in these collections, but now find it is a challenge to keep track of the files and facilitate their access. With the SDR as a centralized, long-term home for these works, students can now upload theses directly to the repository, while relevant subject librarians and department staff oversee and support the process. The Department of Physics established the first SDR undergraduate thesis collection in early 2013; within a year, six more programs had followed suit.

Archiving a legendary course

In Mechanical Engineering 310 (ME310) students collaborate for a full year in international, multidisciplinary teams supported by major non-profit and corporate sponsors to solve real world design challenges. The School of Engineering has offered this course since 1969, and along the way has assembled a rich archive of student works. The Terman Engineering Library assumed stewardship of the materials in 2011 and transformed them into a proper research collection, providing many opportunities for the study of design process and innovation. As of 2013, ME310 students deposit their final reports -- like this one and this one -- directly to the SDR online. The older digital files, as well as the works on paper and magnetic tape which have been digitized, are also deposited in the SDR for preservation and access.

The Blume Center's technical reports

The John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center's extensive series of technical reports developed over several decades is one concrete way that the Center carries out its mission to advance research, education and practice in earthquake risk reduction. With over 160 reports published as of Fall 2013, managing the corpus of documents in Drupal had started to become cumbersome. Using the SDR's online deposit system, the faculty and staff are glad to transition the collection to the SDR where the reports are discoverable within a larger library catalog context and made accessible to users from persistent, unchanging URLs.

The Walters Art Museum Manuscripts

With one of the most significant collections of medieval manuscripts in North America, the Walters Art Museum has made page images widely available online through the Digital Walters. Yet the Walters rightly recognized that its current website is not a preservation solution: the content still needs a permanent home for sustained access well into the future. So WAM turned to the SDR, where the scans are stored for long-term protection against data loss or corruption. The SDR also provides access to the files in an environment equipped for searching and, leveraging SDR's web services for images, re-use alongside other world-class collections.